Troops Say They’re Itching to Fight Gamsakhurdia Loyalists

Goggi, a 6-foot-6, 300-pound street fighter, swaggered through the hotel lobby, a revolver butt hanging from his trouser pocket. He toted a Kalashnikov semiautomatic rifle like a toy and teased a woman in the restaurant until she burst into tears.

The Kutaisi Hotel in this lovely western Georgian resort town has seen better times. It now is a staging point for convoys of provisional government reinforcements preparing to crush the faltering attempt by ousted President Zviad Gamsakhurdia to regain power.

“We will cut Gamsakhurdia’s throat,” said one of Goggi’s fellow soldiers in between toasts of Georgian brandy and a lunch that was scraped together by a hard-pressed kitchen staff in these times of shortage in the former Soviet Union.

The hot-blooded men from the capital may be itching for a fight. But leaders of the force now assembling say they will not yet be deployed against Gamsakhurdia’s supporters nearby. The ousted president, a dissident poet elected by a landslide in May, returned to Georgia last week to try to win back power from a military coalition that sent him into exile in early January after a two-week-siege of his seat of government in Tbilisi.

His exact whereabouts are unknown, although the opposition government sought Monday to suggest that he is now seeking asylum in a Western European nation, a report that could not be confirmed.

“At the moment, we are still talking to the people in the Gamsakhurdia areas to make them understand the situation and give up,” a local military chief told reporters here. “If we need to confront him, we hope it will be of a local nature. But we will not allow Georgia to be split up.”

The military maneuvering seems small-scale compared to some fears that the Caucasus republic of more than 5 million people may be on the brink of civil war.

There were reports from Tbilisi on Monday that troops supporting the interim government clashed with Gamsakhurdia supporters at the Black Sea port of Poti and at Abasha over the weekend, but no deaths were reported.

No armed group has more than a few thousand men and only a few score in any one place. One convoy struggling through the snow-bound mountain passes from Tbilisi on Sunday consisted of just two armored personnel carriers, two field guns, three ammunition trucks and three busloads of men with rifles.

Pope, a special correspondent who reports for The Times from Ankara, Turkey, is on assignment in Georgia.